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Monthly Archives: May 2009

Last month Sciencewatch.com put out a ranking of the top 20 countries in engineering. The ranking is based on "the highest total citations to their papers published in Thomson Reuters-indexed journals of Engineering over an 11-year period." You can view the list below, or read about it here.

Ranked by Citations

Rank

Field

Papers

Citations

Citations Per Paper

1

USA

202,141

1,115,430

5.52

2

JAPAN

66,882

237,154

3.55

3

GERMANY

46,643

231,381

4.96

4

ENGLAND

47,910

227,272

4.74

5

PEOPLES R CHINA

64,435

201,881

3.13

6

FRANCE

38,455

186,951

4.86

7

CANADA

34,015

149,229

4.39

8

ITALY

33,372

146,901

4.4

9

TAIWAN

27,786

96,036

3.46

10

SOUTH KOREA

30,013

91,955

3.06

11

SPAIN

21,025

88,569

4.21

12

AUSTRALIA

17,407

81,127

4.66

13

NETHERLANDS

13,727

74,175

5.4

14

INDIA

23,382

68,534

2.93

15

SWITZERLAND

10,481

67,600

6.45

16

RUSSIA

22,847

58,059

2.54

17

SWEDEN

10,608

57,944

5.46

18

BELGIUM

8,999

49,792

5.53

19

SINGAPORE

11,744

48,797

4.16

20

TURKEY

11,962

41,586

3.48

Sciencewatch.com is put out by Thomas Reuters, makers of the popular citation searching database Web of Science, and offers a wealth of information and tools to keep you up to date with new research in science, technology, and medicine. Some of the useful resources from Sciencwatch.com include: New Hot Papers lists new papers that are among the top tenth of a percent in citations for the last bimonthly period and Research Front Maps creates a visual representation of links between new highly cited papers in a particular field.

Both the United States and Canada launched new data web portals this month.

Data.gov is the United States’ new data website offering a limited number of datasets in a broad range of categories including: Energy and Utilities, Science and Technology, and Transportation among others. Two searchable catalogs are provided, a raw data catalog and a tools catalog with links to data mining tools. A video tutorial is available at http://www.data.gov/howtouse. You can also make recommendations for datasets that are not already included. To read the Whitehouse press release visit http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/Democratizing-Data/

The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) now publishes pre-print copies of manuscripts online within 72 hours of of acceptance to an ASCE journal, making information available months before the copyedited version is available online and in print. According to ASCE:

"Preview papers are functionally integrated into ASCE’s Research Library and all papers are searchable. Preview papers are also included in the e-mail notification of new papers, which can be requested through the ASCE Research Library’s email alerting system."

Princeton University Libraries has a five day trial to ASM International’s Alloy Phase Diagram Center. This online tool “allows subscribers to explore, search and view more than 28,000 binary and ternary phase diagrams and associated phase data for more than 6,200 systems from their Web browsers.”